Descending Star

CHORALE

Carlisle dropped in on Ben and Dr. Niland on the day before the Spring Chorale to report a bureaucratic complication. Ben had been working toward attendance of the concert as a motivational goal, but in truth he had never really believed he would recuperate in time to get there, not even in a wheelchair.

He had told Dr. Niland that he would not attend unless he could haul himself out of the wheelchair on his own power and ascend the risers to stand with the chorus. He'd been working on the use of dual crutches all week and still couldn't get in and out of bed on his own. Edythe spotted him every time, and well that she did, or he would have face-planted several times by now.

Ben's mobility, Carlisle explained, was the lesser concern. The essential difficulty was that the hospital administrators would not allow Ben to leave the premises on a pleasure jaunt without formal release.

"A liability issue. The hospital can't remain responsible for your safety and allow you to go off-campus. So, to attend the Spring Chorale, you would have to be discharged, and after the concert, you would have to return home. To Charlie's house."

Ben's attention snapped to Dr. Niland, and he silently pleaded.

Dr. Niland assured him, "No worries, Ben. I can do house calls."

"It's not that. My house has stairs. Steep, narrow stairs. My bedroom and the one bathroom are at the top of them. And I can't even get in and out of bed."

"You will," Dr. Niland promised.

"By tomorrow?" Ben countered.

Charlie got wind of the purported difficulty when he dropped by after work for his nightly visit.

"Great that you'll be coming home, and about time, too," he said with a baleful glance around the vast institutional conference room and a shudder at its cold air. "You'll never come out of those casts without proper cookin'." According to Charlie, the stairs presented no difficulty, because he'd totally thought it through. Ben could attend school from his bedroom, and Charlie had already set up a hotplate on a cleared space on one of the bookshelves. He had also placed a portable refrigerator in the corner, which he would stock every morning before work, until Ben could make it down to the kitchen on his own.

"Besides," Charlie maintained, "you'll be up and around in no time. Don't give yourself enough credit."

"Or I give myself too much. I'm going to bungle the crutches on those stairs and break my neck."

Charlie had a good laugh at that. "Wouldn't be the first time," he chortled.

So good of him to see the humor in it, Ben thought acidly.

Through the course of these debates, Edythe sat alone at the far end of the room, on the Chesterfield, and silently yearned to see Benjamin back home in his own bed. He did not ask for her opinion, and she did not offer, not in the presence of his father.

Later, after Charlie's departure, she lay in bed beside him and whispered, "It will be nice to have you back home, where you belong. Though any reasonable person would concur that this is far too soon."

He admitted that he couldn't imagine it. He had never really counted on making it to the Spring Chorale, and he didn't understand the necessity. The casts on his arms were impediments to mobility that motivated his self-perception of helplessness. He couldn't bend his elbows, and that restriction constantly hampered him, a more acute constraint than the wrappings around his chest or the pelvic cast. The latter effectively suppressed his libido, but he couldn't contemplate performing in that respect, when he couldn't even properly embrace Edythe, let alone get himself out of bed and climb up and down stairs.